The technological advances of just the last decade—mobile computing, social networking, blogging, tablet computers—were never thought to be “essential” when first introduced. But while they started as novelties, their advantages became apparent, and today these are all part of our daily lives. These are commonly referred to as “disruptive technologies”: upstart developments that originally found their place in niche markets outside of the mainstream, but gradually “disrupted” the conventional landscape (and conventional wisdom) to become the established ways of doing things.

In our capitalist economy, disruptive technology is considered a very good thing. It has made our lives easier, more enjoyable, and more productive. It has created no small number of multimillionaires. Entrepreneurs worldwide are constantly looking for the next established technologies to disrupt, usurp, and overturn, in hopes of a very handsome payoff.

In medicine, when we talk about “disruption,” the implication is not quite as positive. In fact, the term “disruptive physician” is an insult, a black mark on one’s record that can be very hard to overcome. It refers to someone who doesn’t cooperate, doesn’t follow established protocols, yells at people, discriminates against others, who might abuse drugs or alcohol, or who is generally incompetent. These are not good things.

Really? Now, no one would argue that substance abuse, profanity, spreading rumors, degrading one’s peers, or incompetence are good. But what about the physician who “expresses political views that are disagreeable to the hospital administration”? How about the physician who speaks out about deficiencies in patient care or patient safety, or who (legitimately) points out the incompetence of others? How about the physician who prioritizes his own financial and/or business objectives over those of the hospital (when in fact it may be the only way to protect one’s ability to practice)? All of these have been considered to be “disruptive” behaviors and could be used by highly conservative medical staffs to discipline physicians and preserve the status quo.

Is this fair? In modern psychiatry, with its shrinking appointment lengths, overreliance on the highly deficient DSM, excessive emphasis on pharmacological solutions, and an increasing ignorance of developmental models and psychosocial interventions among practitioners, maybe someone should stand up and express opinions that the “powers that be” might consider unacceptable. Someone should speak out on behalf of patient safety. Someone should point out extravagant examples of waste, incompetence, or abuse of privilege. Plenty of psych bloggers and a few renegade psychiatrists do express these opinions, but they (we?) are a minority. I don’t know of any department chairmen or APA officers who are willing to be so “disruptive.” As a result, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

That’s not to say there aren’t any disruptive technologies in psychiatry. What are they? Well, medications, for instance. Drug treatment “disrupted” psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and represent the foundation of most psychiatric treatment today. Over the last 30 years, pharmaceutical companies (and prescribers) have earned millions of dollars from SSRIs, SNRIs, second-generation antipsychotics, psychostimulants, and many others. But are people less mentally ill now than they were in the early 1980s? Today—just in time for patent expirations!—we’re already seeing the next disruptive medication technologies, like those based on glutamate and glutamine signaling. According to Stephen Stahl at the most recent NEI Global Congress, “we’ve beaten the monoamine horse sixteen ways to Sunday” (translation: we’ve milked everything we can out of the serotonin and dopamine stories) and glutamate is the next blockbuster drug target to disrupt the marketplace.

Another disruptive technology is the DSM. I don’t have much to add to what’s already been written about the DSM-5 controversy except to point out what should be obvious: We don’t need another DSM right now. Practically speaking, a new DSM is absolutely unnecessary. It will NOT help me treat patients any better. But it’s coming, like it or not. It will disrupt the way we have conducted our practices for the last 10 years (guided by the equally imperfect DSM-IV-TR), and it will put millions more dollars in the coffers of the APA.

And then, of course, is the electronic medical record (EMR). As with the DSM-5, I don’t need to have an EMR to practice psychiatry. But some politicians in Washington, DC, decided that, as a component of the Affordable Care Act (and in preparation for truly nationalized health care), we should all use EMRs. They even offered a financial incentive to doctors to do so (and are levying penalties for not doing so). And despite some isolated benefits (which are more theoretical than practical, frankly), EMRs are disruptive. Just not in the right way. They disrupt work flow, the doctor-patient relationship, and, sometimes, common sense. But they’re here to stay.

In the interest of full disclosure, I use some of the above services, and some are quite useful. I believe telemedicine, in particular, has great potential. But at the end of the day, these market-driven novelties ignore some of the bigger, more entrenched problems in medicine, which only practicing docs see. In my opinion, the factors that would truly help psychiatrists take better care of patients are of a different nature entirely: improving psychiatric training (of MDs and non-MD prescribers); emphasizing recovery and patient autonomy in our billing and reimbursement policies; eliminating heavily biased pharmaceutical advertising (both to patients and to providers); revealing the extensive and unstated conflicts of interest among our field’s “key opinion leaders”; reforming the “disability” system and disconnecting it from Medicaid, particularly among indigent patients; and reallocating health-care resources more equitably. But, as a physician, if I were to go to my superiors with any ideas to reform the above in my day-to-day work, I run the risk of being labeled “disruptive.” When in fact, that would be my exact intent: to disrupt some of the damaging, wasteful practices that occur in our practices almost every day.

I agree that disruption in medicine can be a good thing, and can advance the quality and cost-effectiveness of care. But when most of the “disruptions” come from individuals who are not actively in the trenches, and who don’t know where needs are the greatest, we may be doing absolutely nothing to improve care. Even worse, when we fail to embrace the novel ideas of physicians—but instead discipline those physicians for being “disruptive”—we risk punishing creativity, destroying morale, and fostering a sense of helplessness that, in the end, serves no one.

There’s a lot you can say about an electronic medical record (EMR). Some of it is good: it’s more legible than a written chart, it facilitates billing, and it’s (usually) readily accessible. On the other hand, EMRs are often cumbersome and confusing, they encourage “checklist”-style medicine, and they contain a lot of useless or duplicate information. But a recent experience in my child/adolescent clinic opened my eyes to where an EMR might really mislead us.

David, a 9 year-old elementary school student, has been coming to the clinic every month for the last three years. He carries a diagnosis of “bipolar disorder,” manifested primarily as extreme shifts in mood, easy irritability, insomnia, and trouble controlling his temper, both in the classroom and at home. Previous doctors had diagnosed “oppositional defiant disorder,” then ADHD, then bipolar. He had had a trial of psychostimulants with no effect, as well as some brief behavioral therapy. Somewhere along the way, a combination of clonidine and Risperdal was started, and those have been David’s meds for the last year.

The information in the above paragraph came from my single interaction with David and his mom. It was the first time I had seen David; he was added to my schedule at the last minute because the doctor he had been seeing for the last four months—a locum tenens doc—was unavailable.

Shortly before the visit, I had opened David’s EMR record to review his case, but it was not very informative. Our EMR only allows one note to be open at a time, and I saw the same thing—”bipolar, stable, continue current meds”—and some other text, apparently cut & pasted, in each of his last 3-4 notes. This was no big surprise; EMRs are full of cut & pasted material, plus lots of other boilerplate stuff that is necessary for legal & billing purposes but can easily be ignored. The take-home message, at the time, was that David had been fairly stable for at least the last few months and probably just needed a refill.

During the appointment, I took note that David was a very pleasant child, agreeable and polite. Mom said he had been “doing well.” But I also noticed that, throughout the interview, David’s mom was behaving strangely—her head bobbed rhythmically side to side, and her arms moved in a writhing motion. She spoke tangentially and demonstrated some acute (and extreme) shifts in emotion, at one point even crying suddenly, with no obvious trigger.

I asked questions about their home environment, David’s access to drugs and alcohol, etc., and I learned that mom used Vicodin, Soma, and Xanax. She admitted that they weren’t prescribed to her—she bought them from friends. Moreover, she reported that she “had just taken a few Xanax to get out the door this morning” which, she said, “might explain why I’m acting like this.” She also shared with me that she had been sent to jail four years ago on an accusation of child abuse (she had allegedly struck her teenage daughter during an argument), at which time David and his brothers were sent to an emergency children’s shelter for four nights.

Even though I’m not David’s regular doctor, I felt that these details were relevant to his case. It was entirely possible, in my opinion, that David’s home environment—a mother using prescription drugs inappropriately, a possible history of trauma—had contributed to his mood lability and “temper dysregulation,” something that a “bipolar” label might mask.

But I’m not writing this to argue that David isn’t “bipolar.” Instead, I wish to point out that I obtained these details simply by observing the interaction between David and his mom over the course of ~30 minutes, and asking a few questions, and not by reading his EMR record. In fact, after the appointment I reviewed the last 12 months of his EMR record, which showed dozens of psychiatrists’ notes, therapists’ notes, case manager’s notes, demographic updates, and “treatment plans,” and all of it was generally the same: diagnosis, brief status updates, LOTS of boilerplate mumbo-jumbo, pages and pages of checkboxes, a few mentions of symptoms. Nothing about David’s home situation or mom’s past. In fact, nothing about mom at all. I could not have been the first clinician to have had concerns about David’s home environment, but if such information was to be found in his EMR record, I had no idea where.

Medical charts—particularly in psychiatry—are living documents. To any physician who has practiced for more than a decade or so, simply opening an actual, physical, paper chart can be like unfolding a treasure map: you don’t know what you’ll find, but you know that there may be riches to be revealed. Sometimes, while thumbing through the chart, a note jumps out because it’s clearly detailed or something relevant is highlighted or “flagged” (in the past, I learned how to spot the handwriting of the more perceptive and thorough clinicians). Devices like Post-It notes or folded pages provide easy—albeit low-tech—access to relevant information. Also, a thick paper chart means a long (or complicated) history in treatment, necessitating a more thorough review. Sometimes the absence of notes over a period of time indicates a period of decompensation, a move, or, possibly a period of remission. All of this is available, literally, at one’s fingertips.

EMRs are far more restrictive. In David’s case, the EMR was my only source of information—apart from David himself. And for David, it seemed sterile, bland, just a series of “check-ins” of a bipolar kid on Risperdal. There was probably more info somewhere in there, but it was too difficult and non-intuitive to access. Hence, the practice (adopted by most clinicians) of just opening up the patient’s most recent note—and that’s it.

Unfortunately, this leads to a therapeutic myopia that may change how we practice medicine. EMRs, when used this way, are here-and-now. They have become the medical equivalent of Facebook. When I log on to the EMR, I see my patient’s most recent note—a “status update,” so to speak—but not much else. It takes time and effort to search through a patient’s profile for more relevant historical info—and that’s if you know where to look. After working with seven different EMRs in the last six years, I can say that they’re all pretty similar in this regard. And if an electronic chart is only going to be used for its most recent note, there’s no incentive to be thorough.

Access to information is great. But the “usability” of EMRs is so poor that we have easy access only to what the last clinician thought was important. Or better yet, what he or she decided to document. The rest—like David’s home life, the potential impact of his mother’s behavior on his symptoms, and environmental factors that require our ongoing attention, all of which may be far more meaningful than David’s last Risperdal dose—must be obtained “from scratch.” If it is obtained at all.

Over the years, the practice of medicine has become less of an art, and more a process of crossing T’s and dotting I’s. “Treating the chart” has become, in many ways, more important than treating the patient, and it seems that the pen—or, rather, the electronic medical record—has emerged as a more valuable tool than the stethoscope or reflex hammer.

For psychiatrists, one of the pesky little details of any office visit is obtaining “informed consent.” Most commonly, this is the document—signed by the patient—stating that he/she has been fully informed of the reason they’re being prescribed a medication, the potential risks of taking said medication, and any possible alternatives. Most private insurers and hospitals, and all Medicaid programs, require this documentation in the charts of patients seeing mental health specialists, and (at least in my experience) these documents are frequently sought in chart audits.

What do I mean by “pesky”? Put briefly, the process of obtaining informed consent can be time-consuming, and some doctors worry that it might actually interfere with treatment. In a 2004 survey, for instance, 44% of psychiatrists reported that “informed consent … increases patients’ anxiety.” With respect to antipsychotics, nearly 20% of psychiatrists in the same study admitted “it is good practice to withhold information about tardive dyskinesia from some patients.” As a result, patients are often poorly informed about the meds they take. In a 2001 study of psychiatric inpatients in Scotland, fewer than half knew the reason they were receiving medication, the side effects of those medications, or even remembered getting an explanation from staff. (But, according to the survey, far more than half were “happy to take all medications”!!)

I was recently asked for some suggestions on how to improve the medication-consent process in my outpatient clinic. I must admit, the current process is atrocious. Our forms are 10+ years old, with general descriptions of each class of medication (and, of course, they lack any drug introduced in the last decade); and they have that “photocopy of a photocopy” appearance, with faded margins and text at a crooked angle. But hey, no big deal—they’re just papers to sign and stick in the chart, basically. In the community clinic where I work part-time, the process is even more rudimentary: we have one generic form with no drug names or descriptions; the front-desk staff asks each patient to sign the form before each visit, and afterward I simply write in the name of the medication(s) I’ve prescribed.

In thinking of ways to improve the process, I’ve come to realize that it may provide an opportunity for some meaningful change in our treatment approach.

First of all, there’s no excuse for not describing the potential adverse effects of the drugs we use, but we must be cautious not to trivialize this process. Most psychiatrists I know, for example, have a readymade “speech” about the potential for rash with Lamictal, or weight gain with Zyprexa, or sedation with Seroquel. (See this post at Shrink Rap—and its comments—for more on this perspective.) But if the patient hears this as just a “speech,” it’s less likely to be meaningful, just like the pre-flight safety lectures you hear on airplanes. I advise my students and residents to pretend they’re prescribing to their spouse, parent, or child, and give all the information they would want to hear about each new drug. (This includes how to stop the medication, too.)

Second, just as important as the potential adverse effects, I believe that patients need to hear more specific explanations of how the drug might actually provide some benefit. All too often we give a feeble explanation like “this Prozac should make you feel better in a few weeks” or ” Valium might calm your nerves a bit” or “since you haven’t responded to your antidepressant, here’s some Abilify to help it along.” We owe it to our patients (and to ourselves) to provide more detailed explanations. To be sure, most patients don’t need to hear a molecular mechanism, complete with pKa values or details of CYP450 metabolism, but we ought to have this information in our heads, and we must know how we’re using this information to treat the patient in front of us. When a patient asks how an antipsychotic might help their depression, or why an anticonvulsant might help stabilize their mood, we must give an answer. (And if no good answer is possible, we need to rethink our treatment plan.)

Third, it is equally important to discuss treatment options with a patient. When patients ask “is there anything else I can do or take?” the ensuing discussion might extend the appointment by a few minutes, but it always leads to a more collaborative dialogue (unless, of course, the patient is fishing for a Xanax prescription or a month’s supply of Seroquel to sell for cash). A discussion of alternatives often gives an indication of what the patient wants, what the patient values, and how we can best promote the patient’s recovery.

Finally, the informed consent process really should be extended to non-psychiatrists who prescribe these agents. Primary-care docs routinely prescribe antidepressants, benzodiazepines, psychostimulants, and mood stabilizers (and, of course, my personal favorite, “Seroquel for sleep”), without a discussion of risks, benefits, and alternatives, or (in most cases) a signed consent form. Heck, even gastroenterologists prescribe Reglan, which is as likely to cause tardive dyskinesia as many of the antipsychotics we use in psychiatry, and pain specialists are fond of Cymbalta (an SNRI with some potentially nasty withdrawal effects) for “chronic pain.” These providers should recognize the potential risks (and mechanisms) of psychotropics, just as psychiatrists do, and share them with their patients.

So even though we might look at obtaining informed consent as a “necessary evil,” we should instead look at it as a way to enhance treatment. If nothing else, this would force us to think about what we do and why we do it. It would enable us to honestly evaluate the true benefits and risks of what we prescribe, and maybe steer us in a different—and healthier—direction.

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are the way of the future. And, for most practices, that future is today, whether we like it or not. The federal Center for Medicare Services is paying doctors a financial incentive to switch from paper to electronic charts, and the first checks have already been cut.

It’s notable that the government has chosen to bribe doctors to switch to electronic records, when no one had to pay us (or you) to use Google or Facebook or Twitter. Maybe it’s because EMRs don’t run like Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Despite the tremendous potential benefits of EMRs, they remain clunky, distracting, and non-intuitive. In their current form, their benefits are clearly limited to administrators, third-party payers, and others who are more interested in data than in the quality of care provided. But what do I know, I’m just a doctor, and no one ever asked me.

Anyway, in the last 18 months, I’ve had the opportunity to use two different EMRs, one called Patient Care Manager by Prime Clinical (about which I can’t find much positive to say, so I’ll keep my mouth shut), and another, Practice Fusion. I must admit I’ve been rather impressed by Practice Fusion, a free “cloud-based” EMR system with many user-customizable features and a surprisingly simple interface.

Alas, for several hours yesterday—right in the middle of a busy Monday—Practice Fusion went down. As in: totally unavailable. Couldn’t log on, couldn’t view any charts, lab reports, patient correspondence, or the daily schedule. Couldn’t even look at patient demographics. It was as if the entire chart rooms of hundreds of doctors’ offices across America were closed for the day.

In a conventional practice with paper charts, this sort of thing is unacceptable. To be sure, things get lost every once in a while, but to lose access to an entire chart room—and schedule—without any idea of when it will return, is a potentially very serious problem. Doctors have been severely disciplined for losing or missing data (even in individual cases), and clinics have been penalized with significant fines for shoddy recordkeeping.

Fortunately, Practice Fusion came back up late in the day, but not until hundreds of practices across the country struggled for 5-6 hours without vital information, making for a very difficult Monday.

I should point out that (when it works) Practice Fusion is unique. More so than any other EMR I’ve used, PF is extremely user-friendly, offering informative (and sometimes humorous and irreverent) YouTube videos, live online chat, and an attentive support team. They even allow comments on their public Facebook page. You might expect it to be a place for doctors to vent their outrage on a day like yesterday. To the contrary, most of the comments were quite sympathetic. Some direct quotes:

“I feel like I’m deaf and blind… could not pull labs or test results…. I know it happens. It could happen even to the best. But hey! It’s not the end of the world! True, it’s very inconvenient since I’ll be spending most of my evening trying to catch up charting. But still… Love you guys! Keep up the good work!”

“We are thankful for PF, even with the RARE problem…. Thanks to you and the team for providing us a reliable and FREE EMR.”

“If it’s going to stay this fast [after the outage] I can get over being down today though it was quite stressful! Thank you PF staff. You were probably stressed too.”

It’s a surprising commentary when a very significant glitch in a widely used EMR system—which, in a conventional practice situation, might have resulted in disciplinary action or heavy fines, and which most certainly resulted yesterday in lost income for a number of docs and probably more than a few adverse patient outcomes—was accepted with such grace.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but EMRs are not like any other piece of software. When Netflix goes down, I can’t watch a streaming movie. But when Practice Fusion goes down, I can’t access vital information which may make a significant impact on the well-being of the patients in my office. It’s a very slippery slope when we “permit” EMRs to be buggy, and even worse when we providers simply “accept” it (and even give the companies a free pass) when they go down.

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I consider myself to be a fairly tech-savvy guy. I grew up in the 80s and computers have been a part of my leisure time, my academic life, and my work environment for as long as I can remember. But using an electronic medical record (EMR) is testing my patience.

More importantly, it’s yet another example of an external influence which is changing the practice of psychiatry. And not for the better.

I learned how to practice medicine from teachers who valued the essence of the interpersonal relationship between patient and doctor. What attracted me to psychiatry in particular was the fact that in this field, these unspoken and unquantifiable aspects of the doctor-patient dyad are paramount, much more so than in any other medical specialty. The patient’s subjective feelings about the therapeutic relationship—the patient’s unconscious transference of experience from past relationships into the present, for example—are as much a part of the therapeutic process as his or her verbal reports or directly measurable behavioral symptoms. The “soul” of psychiatry lies in this nonverbal interaction.

Moreover, this relationship transcends time. For as much as we like to bemoan the “15-minute med check” appointment, the truth is that fifteen minutes is plenty of time for an expert clinician to get an overall feeling for a patient—the “Gestalt” impression that informs the treatment process. By the same token, a one-hour session by a poorly trained clinician is nothing more than data gathering.

EMRs are changing how we document information. One could argue, correctly, that documentation has always been an important part of clinical care, and not directly related to the doctor-patient relationship. However, a well-written note (not to mention the exquisitely detailed psychodynamic case formulations from years past) can convey a rich trove of information about a patient’s history, symptoms, underlying pathology, and future goals.

The type of information we document in an EMR, however, is different. I’ve commented elsewhere that the ideal EMR for a psychiatrist would be a word processor and an encrypted hard drive. Nothing more. Just let me enter all the information that I think is relevant in a given session and save it for next time.

But EMRs weren’t designed for the psychiatrist or the patient. They were designed for administrators, billing experts, lawyers, insurance companies, and others who care more about the quantifiable aspects of the interaction (the diagnosis, the medication prescribed, the presence/absence of discrete symptoms) than about the patterns of symptoms, the clinician’s subjective assessment, and the hypotheses underlying the patient’s behavior which are being actively tested in the therapeutic relationship.

The amount of time it takes me to document everything that is required for “correct billing” of my appointments (and to double-check everything, lest I get a call from my administrator the next day to “fix the chart”) takes up virtually the entire scheduled appointment time.

But my concern here is not about the time it takes, or even about the nuisance of having to click on a few dozen boxes during each patient encounter, or open six different documents—in different formats, in non-overlapping windows—to see what’s happened since a patient’s last visit. (I like to think that I’m a quick enough learner to do all of that.) My concern instead is with how I’m now starting to think of patients not as human beings with interesting and complicated histories which inform my care, but rather as collections of symptoms which change from visit to visit.

EMRs demand measurement and assessment of patients on scales that are, for the most part, arbitrary, and which may be completely “off the mark” vis-à-vis what’s really happening in a person’s life. They ask us to quantify things that cannot be quantified, and distract our attention from what might be truly significant in the patient’s life at the time of the encounter.

Hey, maybe that’s okay. After all, it’s the monthly visits by patient 2010-00224, dx code 296.34, that pay the bills. And as long as I’ve checked the boxes next to “depressed mood” or “insomnia” or “feelings of guilt” (not to mention the other two-dozen boxes I need to check for his mental status exam and review of systems), and updated his problem list, and made sure I checked the box indicating he isn’t suicidal (never mind whether I actually asked him or not), that counts as “good” care.

But by this time, I’m not a psychiatrist. Heck, I’m not even a human, I’m entranced, soulless, and following someone else’s commands. A zombie. And patient 2010-00224 deserves more than that.

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Steve Balt

All posts, unless otherwise noted, are written by Steve Balt, MD, current Editor-in-Chief of The Carlat Psychiatry Report (TCPR). TCPR is a monthly continuing education newsletter for psychiatrists and other mental health professionals with a focus on practical tips, clinical pearls, and reviews of research with the promise of no pharmaceutical or device industry bias. Read more about Dr. Balt on his About Me page.